As the crisis of capitalism deepens, the masses of people are coming out more and more in protests and struggles on many fronts – fighting against the exploitation and oppression imposed on them by the capitalist class.

Facing this crisis, the monopoly capitalists are more and more trying to depoliticize people and degrade their consciousness.

Whenever the capitalists want to launch a new initiative – whether it be a war against another country or the further dismantling of the public sectors of the economy – the people are bombarded with disinformation designed to mystify the causes of social problems and demonize the enemies of capitalism. For example, in order to prepare public opinion for the privatization of Social Security, the capitalists are continuously repeating the Big Lie that “Social Security is going bankrupt.”

Such political discussion and analysis as appears in the monopoly-controlled media always remains within the limits defined by the monopoly capitalist class. People are offered the “choice” of higher taxes or less social spending. But all the while the monopoly-controlled media starts from the unspoken assumption that the bulk of the government’s budget must go to the military arms merchants or the Wall Street bankers. Similarly, the workers are threatened that if they don’t accept wage cuts, they will lose their jobs. Again, the unspoken assumption, is that – first, last and always – the profits of the capitalists must be protected.

The Democrats and Republicans help impose this preset agenda on the people. Of course, the Democrats and Republicans put on a show and play a real con game on the public by pretending to “argue” over the agenda. But both “sides” of the “debate” remain within the limits set by the needs of monopoly capital. Thus, the Republicans demand the all-around privatization of the public schools while the Democrats advertise their program of partial privatization not merely as the “lesser evil” but as a real victory for the people. This pre-set agenda completely excludes the workers and prevents our country from finding solutions to the pressing economic, social and political problems facing the people.

Under the current system of bourgeois democracy, elections are held only to give the appearance of legitimacy, to create the idea that people have given their consent to the rule of capital. Through the two-party monopoly the capitalists have rigged the system to insure that only representatives of big business control the seats of government. The people have no real vote or choice because the right to nominate candidates and run for office has been reserved as a privilege of the rich. What is more, the elected officials are completely unaccountable to the people, who are deprived of any direct role in setting the agenda or in governance.

In fact, behind the facade of democracy, government power is becoming more and more arbitrary. Take, for example, the government’s vast power to tax and spend. Over the last several years, the Democrats and Republicans have advertised their radical cutbacks in social investments and entitlement programs as a virtual “revolution” (read: counter-revolution.) But the people had absolutely no role in the decision to slash income support programs for the poor and most vulnerable or in the government program of privatizing social services. In other words, whenever the time for talk is over and the real interests of capitalism are at stake, the government reveals itself as nothing more nor less than the arbitrary, violent power of monopoly capital.

In order to fortify the capitalist relations based on exploitation of the working class, the monopolists have entrenched a system of political privilege which insures their domination over the state.

While the formal shell of universal franchise exists, the current system of representative democracy does not place sovereignty with the people themselves but rather with the government, which is free to carry out its policies without regard for the will of the people, and which has placed itself above society, unaccountable to the people.

The system of Party government through which the big political parties are given, in law and in fact, a monopoly over the selection and nomination of candidates for office further guards the political power of the capitalist class, undercutting the right to vote and disenfranchising the people from their right to nominate and select government officials as well as from any direct role in governance.

The real political power resides in the Executive branch of government, including the bureaucracy, the police and military forces under the command of the Executive. This executive power, in the manner of the feudal monarchs, acts as an absolute and arbitrary power over the masses of people and is, in reality, the class power of monopoly capital. This class power stands in irreconcilable opposition to democracy – to rule by the people – and relies, in the final analysis, on violence to maintain the system of private property in the means of production and to impose class exploitation and oppression on the workers and broad masses of people.

Thus, while wealth and power accumulate at one pole of the society in the hands of a tiny minority of monopoly capitalists, misery, poverty and powerlessness grow at the other pole amongst the great mass of the society. The working class – the class which has no way to live except to sell its labor-power day in and day out to the capitalist owners – is the special product of modern industry and constitutes the overwhelming majority of the society.

The domination of the capitalist class rests secure only so far and so long as it can maintain competition amongst the workers. But the entire history of the working class shows that it overcomes the competition fostered in its ranks through common organization and collective struggle, coming out as a class for itself to fight for its emancipation. As a class for itself, the working class puts forward its own program, including both immediate and long-range objectives, as the basis for uniting its ranks as well as for leading the whole society out of the crisis of capitalism and onto the path of social progress.

Every day as more people become thoroughly fed up with the two-party monopoly of the Democrats and Republicans, the need for building the alternative – building the independent political movement of the working class – becomes even more urgent.

But the independent movement will not arise spontaneously or by magic. It can only be built through energetic work and struggle. The starting point of this work is popularizing the independent class aims and program of the workers.

The Workers Party is involved in the continuous, day-to-day work of uniting people on the basis of the independent program of economic rights, democratic renewal, a democratic foreign policy and socialism.

We popularize this program on the widest possible basis and initiate repeated actions to mobilize people in the fight for this program. In addition, the Party works in the many spontaneous struggles and on-going movements of the people both to maximize the immediate impact of these struggles and to inform them with the general aims and program of the working class.

The centerpiece of the tactical program of the Workers Party is the struggle to carry out the democratic renewal of the political system and the political process. Today, the American people, who emerged as a nation in the struggle against the absolute power of the feudal kings, again face an entrenched political power which has usurped the sovereignty of the people. Today, the Republican and Democratic parties, creatures created by the economic elite, wield the same arbitrary power as the Kings and Lords of the feudal period, deciding, without regard for the will of the people, such vital questions as war and peace and the direction of the national economy, and dispersing the funds of the public treasury in order to line the pockets of the economic elite. Facing this political situation, the American people must take up the struggle to renew the political system and political process so that the sovereign power – the decision-making power – returns to the people themselves and the people are able to directly participate in governing their affairs.

The program for democratic renewal aims at breaking the monopoly of the capitalist class and its parties over political affairs and empowering the working class and people. In addition to guaranteeing all the democratic rights of the people, the program of democratic renewal demands that the power to nominate candidates be returned to the people and that everyone be guaranteed the equal right to elect and be elected.

This program aims at giving direction and consciousness to the profound disillusionment and political alienation of the people. It exposes the fundamental flaws in the current political process and political system, showing how monopoly capital has rigged the current system to guard its political power. The program of democratic renewal relies on the independent political initiative of the people and brings to the forefront the question of political power.

Democratic renewal puts forward a modern definition of rights which includes recognition of the peoples’ fundamental economic rights (i.e. the right to a livelihood, to health care, etc.) and demands that society guarantees the means necessary for people to exercise all their rights in real life. The program of democratic renewal recognizes that in the final analysis the modern demand for equality – for equal economic, political, and social rights for all human beings – is the demand for the abolition of social classes.

The leading edge of the Party’s day-to-day activity is building “The Worker” as a mass political newspaper of the working class.

By building the workers’ own press, the Workers Party not only breaks the monopoly which the bourgeoisie try to exercise over public opinion, but at the same time unites the workers’ ranks around their independent aims and program. As we deepen and broaden the content of The Worker and other publications and build up a wide distribution network, workers are able to get a more in-depth picture of their movement, grapple with the questions of strategy and tactics as well as build up an organizational scaffolding around which to unfold their independent movement.

Through concrete initiatives, participants use the workers’ press to create space in which people can engage in serious discussion, in which information and facts as well as analysis and solutions are presented. This politicalization process plays an indispensable ideological role in providing class consciousness for the workers and enlightenment for society.

In tactical terms, the Workers Party publications pay constant attention to zeroing in and taking up the immediate tasks which face various collectives such as the workers, the youth and so forth as well as the collective tasks which face the people as a whole. We go far and wide calling on people to join with us in weighing up these collective tasks and in carrying them out.

The Workers Party leads the work of popularizing and elaborating the short-term and long-term program of the working class, taking this program to all sections of the class, as well as to the middle stratum in order to rally it under the leadership of the working class. Elaborating and popularizing the program of the working class involves intensive and extensive theoretical and ideological work. This work is necessary both to continually strengthen the conviction of the workers about the conditions which they must create in order to emancipate themselves, as well as to defeat the attempts of the capitalists to sidetrack the movement.

Uniting the entire working class and rallying the middle stratum behind the program of the working class necessarily requires a struggle against all attempts to create division and competition in the workers’ ranks, as well as a struggle to isolate the forces calling for compromise with and reliance on the capitalist class. In other words, the strategy of the working class is based on directing the main blow against the labor aristocracy and the political forces which work to liquidate the class independence of the workers by maintaining a blockade of silence and disinformation about the struggles of people and creating illusions in the capitalist system and the capitalist political parties.

New Steps Taken to Augment the U.S. Nuclear Triad

Despite international bans on expanding its nuclear forces, the U.S. government is carrying forward an all-sided program of honing and growing its massive nuclear arsenal.

On May 10, the U.S. Energy Department and the Department of Defense announced a new decision to migrate the industrial processing of defense plutonium to a Savannah River production facility in South Carolina. The endeavor is part of the government program for making plutonium cores for nuclear weapons.

The U.S. Congress, sucking the life-blood of the people, has already approved the billions of dollars which will be spent on the contracts for this phase in the development of a “next generation” of nuclear weapons. Plans include “mini-nukes” – low-yield nuclear weapons designed to lower the threshold for the use of nuclear weapons and to boost the Pentagon’s nuclear war option in the face of overwhelming and permanent worldwide opposition to its use by the U.S. at the end of WWII.

According to the standard definition of nuclear weapon states as those that built and successfully tested nuclear explosive devices prior to the close of 1966, there are five nuclear weapons states. They are China, France, Russia, the United Kingdom and the USA.

Each of the nuclear weapons states signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) on the promise that it would eliminate its own nuclear weapons.

Despite being a signatory to the NPT, U.S. imperialism never made good on its promises to eliminate its nuclear weapons arsenal. So too, U.S. imperialism has repeatedly violated the treaty by threatening to use nuclear weapons against the peoples of Korea, Lebanon, Vietnam, Iran and elsewhere.

Today, the government of the American people maintains the ability to put an end to several times the population of the entire world with its nuclear weapons hoard. The smallest of the strategic nuclear weapons the U.S. has is powerful enough to obliterate a whole city.

The U.S. government currently maintains a stockpile of over 7,200 nuclear warheads. It is able to deploy these weapons through 430 ICBMs, 230 SLBMs, and 80 bombers. The U.S. is the only country that deploys nuclear weapons in other countries. The “protective nuclear umbrella” of U.S. imperialism is a chain around the necks of the European peoples and the peoples in countries suffering from U.S. neo-colonial and colonial domination.

The U.S. government uses its strategic nuclear superiority and nuclear blackmail in order to maintain and expand the size of the empire of the U.S. multi-national corporations, which plunder the resources and super-exploit the labor of peoples throughout the world. To control sources of raw materials, maintain its strategic spheres of influence and domination, and to extract the maximum profit from the superexploitation of the labor of the colonial and semi-colonial peoples, U.S. imperialism relies, above all, on military might – including its policy of nuclear superiority and shakedown.

As the first and most powerful nuclear state, U.S. imperialism has repeatedly used its nuclear weapons as an instrument of its aggressive aims. Not only did the U.S. drop atom bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but since that time it has also blackmailed other countries and peoples with threats of nuclear war and annihilation.

Since 1997, all US presidential guidelines (Presidential Policy Directives) for waging a nuclear war have included the following:

a) focus on responding quickly and decisively to more limited attacks against smaller nations such as Libya (until 2011), Iran, Iraq (until 2003), and North Korea. The Pentagon is to be given maximum flexibility in planning such nuclear attacks. This replaced the previous focus on fighting a prolonged nuclear conflict against another superpower.

b) reserve the option of using nuclear arms to retaliate against “non-nuclear threats.”

c) maintain nuclear weapons as the cornerstone of U.S. strategic “defense” programs, and to reserve the right to be the first to use nuclear arms during a conflict. U.S. war planners are directed to retain long-standing options for nuclear strikes against the military and civilian leadership and against nuclear forces in Russia. The existing U.S. nuclear “triad” of bombers, submarines, and intercontinental ballistic missiles are to be maintained.

The struggle against militarism and for peace must be directed against U.S. imperialism and the other “Great Power” states, who hold their nuclear swords over the whole world and carry out interference and aggression against the peoples.

U.S. imperialism, which boasts of the most advanced nuclear arsenal in the world, remains both the foremost nuclear war danger as well as the main source of international antagonism and instability in the world of the 21st century.

The American people will not allow the big monopolies and the capitalist state a free hand to pursue their program of global hegemony and nuclear blackmail. We must fight every step of the way against all the aggressive measures of the U.S. government.

In the final analysis, we can only secure ourselves from the grave danger of nuclear war when nuclear weapons are taken out of the hands of the imperialist countries by the peoples, and the imperialist system itself is abolished.

Imperialist Pressure Against Iran

When President Trump recently voided President Obama’s executive agreement authorizing some illegal U.S. sanctions on Iran to be lifted, he didn’t institute any true changes in the U.S. policy. However, he let it be known that the U.S. intends to keep interfering in Iranian affairs, attempting to dictate terms to the Iranian people, and punishing any state which refuses to march to the U.S. drum-beat.

The entire bipartisan campaign against the sovereignty of Iran and other countries that stand up against U.S. dictate and domination is a product of the war program of the U.S. capitalist class.

Across the world, U.S. imperialism has targeted any government that either defends the national rights and sovereignty of its own people, or seeks to ally itself with one of U.S. imperialism’s rivals.

In the case of Iran, it has long been well-established that the real U.S. motives are the questions of oil and the domination of the strategic Middle East region.

The economics of U.S. imperialism is the economics of plunder and exploitation and thus its politics is the politics of conquest, domination and war.

In opposition to U.S. imperialism’s policy of pressure, dictate, interference and aggression in the Middle East and throughout the world, the American working class strives for a democratic foreign policy. A democratic foreign policy demands an end to “Great Power” interference and intervention against sovereign nations, and the democratization of international relations on the basis of recognizing the inviolable right of every nation to determine its own affairs. Every nation must be recognized as equal.

Letter to the Editor

I am a regular reader and distributor of the worker, and I would like to share some of my recent experience.

Every time I go out and speak out against U.S. imperialism’s war program, I meet people enthusiastic to hear something other than the lies and justifications of the capitalist politicians. It is commonplace to meet people who instantly rally to the agenda of a democratic foreign policy and express a desire to get more organized against the wars. Yep, the anti-war sentiment of the American people is more widespread than ever.

More than that though, people are not limiting their opposition to this or that front of the U.S. war program. Many times when I have spoken out against, say the war in Iraq, the response is not only that the U.S. should get out of Iraq and stop interfering, but should end all these aggressive wars and stop its interventions everywhere.

The Economic Rights of the People Are the First Priority, Not the Profits of Big Business

Going against the agenda of “putting big business first,” and implementing the agenda of guaranteeing the economic rights of the people is the only way to resolve the economic crisis.

The experience of the Workers Party amongst the broad masses of working people shows that the vast majority know that our country, which has such vast natural resources, such advanced technology and industry, such hard working people, is more than capable of providing for all the basic needs of the people.

The decisive question is, WHAT IS THE WAY OUT, WHAT IS THE SOLUTION? And there are two distinct, diametrically opposed programs which are offered.

First there is the program of Donald Trump. Trump – like Obama and Bush before him – starts from the point of view that the interests of big business must come first. Trump says that the first priority is to “improve the health of American business,” to make American capitalism “more competitive” in the international economy, to stimulate and increase business investment, etc., etc.

The Workers Party has put forward a clearcut alternative to the program of Donald Trump. Our Party begins from the economic interests of the working class and broad masses of people. Our priority is that the economic needs and economic rights of the people must be guaranteed. We say it is very simple – if you agree that our country has the resources and capacity to provide for the needs and well-being of the people, then the only question is to organize the economy and the society in such a way that these interests come first and are guaranteed. Furthermore, we say that the entire motive and goal of economic life must be precisely to meet the needs of the people, especially the laboring people who ARE THE ECONOMY, who create the wealth of society.

The program of the Workers Party aims at providing consciousness and direction to the many partial struggles being waged by the people. We see the necessity to develop the economic discontent into a conscious political movement – a political movement which can break the monopoly of big business over the policies of government and the life of the country.

Developing such a nation-wide political movement – a struggle of class against class – is the decisive element in terms of achieving solutions to the pressing practical problems of life – the problems of jobs, of wages, of health care, education and so forth.

The outcome of this political struggle will determine the character of our society and its economy – whether it remains oriented first, last and always towards maximizing profit for a small group of exploiters or whether it is oriented towards guaranteeing the needs and rights of the masses of people. Going against the agenda of the monopoly capitalist class and implementing the agenda of guaranteeing the economic rights of the people is the only way to resolve the prolonged crisis which is holding back our country.

The question of the economic crisis is a political question. The entire development of the economic base of society – the tremendous degree of socialization of economic life – as well as the ever-growing consciousness and role of the working class in history has brought the demands for economic rights and economic emancipation to the surface. The capitalists seek to force the agenda of “big business first” down the throat of society by excluding the participation of the masses of people.

The working class program of economic rights, on the other hand, asserts the claims that all human beings have on society and demands iron-clad guarantees for such inalienable human rights as the right to food, clothing and shelter; the right to a job or a livelihood commensurate with our country’s high level of development, the right to education from infant care through university, the right to comprehensive and free health care, etc.

This is a program that can only be implemented by the people themselves. Through its Campaign for Economic Rights, the Workers Party, USA is opening up new independent political space and through its theoretical work amongst the people, the Workers Party is helping to develop the initiative of the people. When people gain the conviction that healthcare is a right, that jobs are a right; when people see clearly that the only thing standing in the way of the realization of these rights is the privilege of a tiny minority, when people sense the strength of their own numbers and see more and more of their brothers and sisters speaking out for the rights of the working people, there is nothing in the world that will prevent the people from rising up in even larger numbers and organizing themselves to win these rights.

We say that THE DECISIVE QUESTION IS TO PUT FORWARD AND DEVELOP THE PROGRAM – THE AGENDA – WHICH SERVES THE NEEDS OF THE MASSES AND TO DEVELOP THE THEORETICAL ELABORATION OF THIS AGENDA.

The starting point for implementing this agenda is to LEAD THE DISCUSSION, which is already taking place in every cell of society, over the causes and solutions to the manifold problems of the people. Through this process we help create a situation in which broader and broader sections of the people can join in the discussion and confidently take up the task of fighting on a common platform for their common interests.

In order to carry forward its immediate and long-range program, the working class relies on its own consciousness and organization.

Under capitalism, where private property in the means of production and profit-seeking disunite the people and engender cutthroat economic competition and anarchy, economic laws act haphazardly, as a blind destructive force.

The working class cannot win victory if it allows its movement for emancipation to develop spontaneously, nor can it implement its short-term and long-term program on a haphazard, hit-or-miss, basis. On the contrary, the decisive factor is for the workers to equip themselves with consciousness and organization so that the movement can advance in a planned and systematic way to achieve the aims the workers have set for themselves. In addition, the working class must wage a continuous struggle against the pressure of bourgeois ideology, which is exerted against the workers’ movement with the aim of getting the workers to give up their role to lead society out of the crisis and onto the path of progress. The key factor in strengthening the consciousness and organization of the working class is for the workers to build their own political party.

For more than 200 years the workers and oppressed people of our country have been coming out in struggle after struggle to assert their rights and bring forward their program for society. From the very beginning, the American people have fought to create a society which guarantees equal rights for all and in which the political power arises from and is controlled by the people themselves. From the very beginning, the American people worked to create a land of refuge and peace and throughout our history we have always sympathized with and supported the liberation struggles of people everywhere.

In the U.S., the movement of the working people for universal education, the movements for the 8-hour day and trade union rights, the struggles for social security, unemployment compensation, Medicare and Medicaid all made continual inroads against the rights of private property, extending the sphere of operation of the economic rights of the people. In the U.S. and on a world scale this movement for economic rights and social equality is given conscious expression in the movement for scientific socialism and communism.

Today, these profound egalitarian, democratic and internationalist traditions of the peoples are carried forward in the struggles and aspirations of the modern working class. The social existence of the workers – who stand at the center of economic life and are united as a class by their common role in social production and social life – give rise to the vision and struggle for a society which abolishes the exploitation and oppression of all human beings and which recognizes and nourishes the humanity of all.

* * *

Part of the struggle for the agenda of the working class is the theoretical work to elaborate and explain this agenda. If the working class is going to play its leading role in society, it cannot sit by and allow the capitalists to monopolize the analysis of problems, to create ideological confusion. The working class must provide theoretical clarity; that is, by taking into account the realities of society and the laws of social development, it must elaborate how solutions can be brought about. The working class must address in theoretical terms the solutions to the problems of health care; the so-called “deficit crisis,” the problem of public education and so forth.

The capitalists put forward all kinds of “theories” and ideas to poison the atmosphere and create roadblocks to resolving problems. For example, the capitalists create tremendous confusion about the questions of the environment, international trade, competitiveness, the problem of productivity, etc., etc. In each and every case, when the arguments of the capitalists are examined it turns out that all that is being said is that the interests of the capitalists must come first, that the workers must accept greater exploitation and deprivation in order to guarantee greater profits and enrichment for American capitalists.

In addition to such economic theories, there are questions about politics, about the nature of society, about the history of the working class movement, about strategy and tactics, about socialism. The working people cannot play their role as political leaders if they do not oppose the mindlessness of the ruling class on these questions – if they allow the whole question of socialism to be passed over with the bourgeois prayer that “communism is dead,” or the whole question of social development reduced to the assertion that, “things can’t change and capitalism is an eternal system.” We must work to create a situation in which such issues are looked into dispassionately and scientifically.

For decades, monopoly capital has worked to marginalize the working class and exclude any pro-social agenda from the political life of the country. In fact, time and again, the workers and people have seen their unity undermined and their struggles liquidated by various political forces which have subordinated the aims and agenda of the people to the aims of the capitalists and betrayed the popular movement. Changing this situation requires consistent, repeated and principled actions to bring the pro-social agenda to center stage, to develop new space in which workers and people can mobilize and empower themselves and step by step change the balance of forces in favor of the people. Progressive activists must really grasp the tremendous responsibilities and possibilities which exist today to create a new political unity. Repeated efforts must be made to break the marginalization of the working class and genuine politics and bring the agenda for positive social change to the forefront.

The Origins of Zionism and the State of Israel

When one stops to look into the actual historical roots of the conflict, one sees that it has absolutely nothing at all to do with Jews hating Muslims or visa versa. Rather one finds that the oppression, the national subjugation imposed on the Palestinian people, is the result of the capitalist-imperialist system.

The current state of Israel is the fruit of a European political movement known as zionism. Political zionism arose in Europe around the turn of the 20th century. At that time, the area in the Middle East now ruled by the state of Israel was Palestine, and had been inhabited and developed not only for hundreds but actually thousands of years by Palestinian people and their forebears. As far as religion is concerned, Palestine was the birthplace of three religions and was well-known as a land of religious tolerance in which Muslims, Christians and Jews lived together without antagonisms and contradictions between them.

Political zionism grew and gained its strength as a creature of Western colonialism. The founder of zionism was a man named Theodor Herzl, an Austrian ruling-class Jew. Herzl looked at the problem of persecution of Jews In Europe by various reactionary ruling classes, and concluded that Jews could never get along with others and could only cope with the inevitable persecution he forecast for them by separating themselves into an exclusive group and founding their own state.

The first thing that must be said about Herzl’s zionism is that it was in direct opposition to the long tradition of the Jewish laboring masses, who, scattered throughout Europe, had fought and won many battles against their persecution side-by-side with other laboring and oppressed people. The truth is that Herzl’s political zionism was a mirror image of the anti-Jewish ideology of those repressive ruling-class circles. Herzl actually stated that the Jew carries anti-Semitism with him in his knapsack. And in fact, political zionism won almost no support amongst the Jewish laboring classes and would have withered and died had it not gained the support of Western imperialism which was looking for ways to replace the Ottoman empire, become the colonial master of the Arab world, and suppress the national movements of the Arab masses.

With this international situation in mind, Herzl peddled his zionist project to all the biggest anti-Semites – to the Russian Czar, to the Turkish Sultan, to the British imperialists, suggesting to them that the establishment of a zionist colony in the Middle East could serve as a “rampart of Europe against Asia, an outpost of civilization against barbarism.” (Herzl, The Jewish State 1896).

The zionist vision of an exclusively Jewish state has always meant precisely a state “without Arabs.” Herzl had planned “to spirit the penniless population across the border” and Weizmann, when questioned about the future of Arabs in a zionist state, remarked: “What Arabs? They are hardly of any consequence.” But since an early system of land and trade frauds was not a sufficient means of emptying Palestine of its native inhabitants, the zionist project relied on terror to forcibly expropriate, exile and exterminate Palestinians.

Today the state of Israel has not only usurped the entire historic homeland and nation of Palestine but it has also officially annexed Jerusalem and Syria’s Golan Heights. It has repeatedly declared its intention to annex the West Bank and Gaza, as well as hold onto its “security belt” in Lebanon. Today, in the West Bank, Israel is planning and calling for more settlements there just as it has recently perpetrated aerial bombardments inside Lebanon and Syria.

In the years since the establishment of the Israeli state, the zionist policy of genocide and dispersal of Palestinians has only intensified. After the 1947-48 war, the Israeli regime forced hundreds of thousands of Palestinians into exile, razing their homes and expropriating their lands. The same process has been carried out since 1967 in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.

Within a week after seizing these territories by force of arms, the Israeli Knesset (Parliament) declared its intention to annex the areas and has proceeded not only to kill and internally displace thousands upon thousands of Palestinians, but also to expropriate by military decree 70-80% of the land.

For its part, U.S. imperialism continues to author and organize the aggressive actions of Israeli zionism, providing it with all-around political, economic and military assistance – including advanced aircraft and missile systems.

In the Middle East, U.S.-sponsored Israeli aggression is a means to consolidate the position of U.S. imperialism while trampling on the rights of the Arab peoples.

Since the end of the savage Persian Gulf war, U.S. imperialism has advertised a phony “peace” process far and wide, even while it has worked feverishly to 1) expand its direct military presence in the region; 2) strengthen its alliances with various reactionary Arab regimes; and 3) further consolidate the positions of its “strategic ally,” the expansionist state of Israel. Over the last few years, U.S. imperialism has pre-positioned numerous tactical units equipped with heavy armor and supported by advanced fighter aircraft in the region, while permanently maintaining an armada of warships. The U.S. has signed new military pacts and alliances with several Arab regimes and repeatedly staged joint war games and “training exercises” with these regimes.

At the same time, U.S. imperialism has labelled anyone and everyone who opposes its “peace” initiatives – that is, who opposes U.S. domination of the region – as “rogues” and “terrorists.” For the Palestinian people, the U.S.-sponsored “autonomy” that has resulted, amounts to nothing more than reservation-like conditions. The Palestinians remain under the political domination and military rule of Israeli zionism, denied their inalienable national right to their own sovereign state.